Continuous Delivery - Self Service Builds
Automated pipelines reduce manual labor and lead to eventual savings since personnel is more expensive than tools. The steep upfront investment can cause concern, however, well-designed pipelines position the organization to innovate better and faster to meet their customers’ needs. CD provides the business with more flexibility in how it delivers features and fixes.
Delivery teams can stop jumping through hoops to move code into production allowing features to get to your customers faster and start getting that return on your investment. Using pipelines allows the system to move fast with streamlined and automated steps. Removing manual release steps allows more time dedicated to the next feature allowing you to stay ahead of competitors. Dash-boarding allows Real-time release status for everyone across the company, they can just go look themselves instead of harassing the delivery team.
For 2018 one of my clients spent approx. 1000 man hours on build issues 15% failure rate builds (6180 builds, 1121 fail)
Building Self Service Platform with Build as Code is my answer to the problem.
Allows for Transparency
- Build is checked in and lives with the application code.
- Visible and configurable by delivery teams, spreading the wealth of knowledge to the teams.
- Cross functional understanding of the build and environments with the application
More Time on Development
- Increases the capability of small rapid and constant deployments.
- Allowing easier detection when bugs/errors occur
- Removes the silo effect for build setup/troubleshooting, no more throwing it over the wall waiting for responses.
Standardization
- eliminates environment drift
- Self-documenting change control process, required for compliance to many regulatory bodies (pci, hippa, etc)